Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI)

ICSI is a technique that has been available in conjunction with IVF since 1993. It is indicated for more moderate or severe cases of male factor infertility that are not responsive to treatment with intrauterine insemination (IUI).

After egg retrieval, mature eggs are identified by our embryologist. When the male partner has demonstrated a normal semen analysis, each egg is surrounded by tens of thousands of moving sperm to allow one to enter with early embryos observed the next day. This approach is insufficient, however, to achieve fertilization when sperm counts are low or the male partner has a low percentage of normal-shaped sperm (low morphology).

In these and other cases, we can employ ICSI to reduce the sperm requirement to a single injected sperm for each egg. The availability of ICSI also provides the opportunity to achieve fertilization with sperm that is surgically obtained by a urologist when the male partner has no sperm in his ejaculate (azoospermia).